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Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 346 pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781474413343.
Reviewed by Justin Tosi, Georgetown University
Philosophers who defend perfectionist accounts of the human good and then go on to develop political theories tend to favor political institutions that promote that view of the good. In other words, political philosophers tend to be perfectionists all the way down, or not at all. Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen are an exception to this rule. In an earlier work, they argued for a neo-Aristotelian perfectionist foundation for political liberalism.[1] Here they develop in greater detail the ethical doctrine of "individualistic perfectionism" that serves as the basis of their political theory. Den Uyl and Rasmussen cast ethical theorizing as proceeding from a choice between two. . .